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Archives / 2003 / September

  • Intresting stuff: Skype & C# HandleWhiteSpace Add-In

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    Skype
    What is Skype? “Skype is the next phenomenon from the people who brought you KaZaA. Just like KaZaA, Skype uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to connect you to other users – not to share files this time, but to talk for free with your friends.” Ok, big deal you could say, we already have Messenger. But I recently had some problems making voice connections to family with Messenger. Even when they were using one of the most recent ADSL Routers, with UPnP enabled, I couldn't connect. So I gave Skype a try and I must say I was amazed; not only the sound quality is in my opinion even better than Messenger, but Skype could make connections to pc's behind firewalls and/or routers. Installation and account creation is very easy, connections are made within a second. Ofcourse they have not (yet?) the huge user base like Messenger, and their focus is on voice communications, but I keep this little program so I can voice chat with people to Messenger can not connect.

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  • Being flexible: CodeDom + Reflection = Killer Combo

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    Component developers have to make decisions all the time about how to flexible their components need to be. They need to find the balance between flexibility and development duration: if they want to increase the flexibility, they probably need to spend more development time. How to implement the needed flexibility depends on the situation. In some cases it is needed that the components must execute code that will be written by developers that actually use these components, so that code is not yet available while designing the component. In other cases it may be required something changes depending on a setting, for example how Customers are displayed (first name + last name, last name + initial, …). Providing this kind of flexibility in your components can require a rather complex model to be able to determine what the ToString method of the Customer object needs to return. But this kind of flexibility could quite easy be accomplished if you only could put some code in a String, and let this code be evaluated by your component. Of course you’d want to avoid writing your own parser for such a String at all times, so what could be of any help? CodeDom and Reflection can be used for solving this kind of problems.

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  • MSDN Belux Site Update

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    Tom and Gerd have updated the MSDN Belux site. They do this every week, but this time they have introduced some nice features (see Tom's post). There is a page about how you can participate in the Belux MSDN Community, so every developer in the Belux (Belgium and Luxembourg) should take a look. A list of bloggers in the Belux is added too.

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  • Edit and Continue?

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    Paul Vick (technical lead of VB.NET)  has posted a nice entry about the edit and continue feature that will be available in the next version of VB.NET. He discusses the danger of introducing this advanced feature, for developers that are not so experienced. In my opinion, edit and continue is abused sometimes be less experienced developers and maybe even by experienced developers. But I think it can be very useful too, if you use it wisely! Paul uses the methaphore of cars to explain why he thinks this feature should be included.

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